Episode
đź—˝ America's immigration edge: My chat (+transcript) with policy expert Alex Nowrasteh
- Published
- May 2, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 1538
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Summary
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, With the rise of American populist nationalism has come the rise of nativism: a belief in the concept of “heritage Americans” and a deep distrust of immigration. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast , I talk with Alex Nowrasteh about the ideology beneath this severe skepticism, as well as what Americans lose economically if we shut our doors to both low- and high-skilled immigrants. Nowrasteh is the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute . He is the author of his own Substack with David Bier , as well as the co-author of Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions . Read more of Nowrasteh’s work on immigration , nationalism , and other research . In This Episode * Illegal immigration (1:16) * Rise of xenophobia (3:48) * Psychology of immigration skeptics (9:20) * The future American workforce (14:04) * Population decline and assimilation (17:35) Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. Illegal immigration (1:16) The system that I would favor is one that allows a substantially larger number of people at every skill level to come into this country legally, to work, to live, and to become Americans . . . because this country demands their labor and there's no way for them to come legally. Pethokoukis: Will you, in a very short period of time, give me a sense of the situation at the southern border of the United States of America in terms of immigration, how that has evolved from Trump 1, to Biden, to now? Is it possible to give me a concise summary of that? Nowrasteh: From Obama through Trump 1, the border apprehension numbers were pretty reasonable, you were talking about somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 per year. Then came Covid, cr…